State must aid pupils from chaotic homes, says Michael Gove

A significant number of children need state intervention in their lives
because they are being “actively harmed” by growing up in chaotic homes,
Michael Gove has warned.

Michael Gove, David Cameron's ally, says the Conservatives will win the next election. Photo: GETTY

By Tim Ross, Political Correspondent

6:34AM BST 24 Oct 2012

The Education Secretary said too many pupils were incapable of learning and not “effectively socialised” by the time they entered formal education aged five.

He was told by a government adviser that some of the most troubled children arrive at primary school still wearing nappies and unable to tell the difference between a letter and a number. Mr Gove suggested that up to 1,000 state primaries with poor results face a fresh assault on low standards and could be turned into privately sponsored academies.

Social workers are required to monitor troubled families but some experts have raised concerns that children are left suffering neglect in their homes for too long before being taken into care.

During a discussion at the Politeia think tank in London, Graham Allen, a Labour MP who advises the government on policies to help deprived children, called for earlier state intervention.

Mr Allen said secondary head teachers often complained that their youngest pupils had not been prepared properly, while primary head teachers said children arrived at school unable to read, speak in a sentence, or recognise the difference between a letter or a number.

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Mr Gove said Mr Allen was “absolutely right”, adding: “There are significant numbers of children who, because of their home environment, arrive at school simply incapable of learning. It’s important that we exercise a degree of restraint when we think about state intervention, but I think we both agree that there are a group of children for whom the state has to intervene.

“They will grow up in circumstances so chaotic that it’s not just a case that they are neglected, it is the case that they are actively harmed by the failure to be in a nurturing environment where their brain can develop.”

These pupils will struggle at school because they do not have the habits that enable them to succeed academically and to become “effectively socialised”, Mr Gove said.

He announced he would begin the next wave of primary school reforms by aiming at those with the lowest results. He will write first to MPs in Leicester and Derby, Labour strongholds, to urge them to support his plans for raising standards in their local primary schools.

He said 310 primary schools have already become academies or are in the process of converting but insisted that reforms to state education must “move even faster”. “There are hundreds more under-performing primary schools, many concentrated in other disadvantaged communities, where we need to act.”

He also called for the freedom to spend taxpayers’ money on ambitious policies that might turn out to be mistakes.

The spending watchdogs, the National Audit Office and the Commons public accounts committee, are “forces of conservatism” that stifle reform, Mr Gove said, adding that it was necessary to experiment to make progress and to “fail” in order to succeed.

Mr Gove described Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, as a “small-c conservative” who wanted to reject Blairism in favour of the “reactionary” politics of the past.

He joked that Mr Miliband’s emphasis on his education in a comprehensive in leafy Hampstead made the affluent north London suburb sound “as though it were some sort of school of hard knocks, a nursery of social solidarity and home of class-consciousness to rank with Durham’s mines or Clydeside’s shipyards”.